My writer's group sponsored a seminar this Saturday. They're a wonderful brunch with a leader who has a heart and a passion for writers and writing. I hadn't been to a meeting in quite some time. Bruce and I headed out early Saturday to the beautiful campus of a local community college.

My word! (No pun intended.) If nothing else, it was an object lesson in how NOT to do a professional presentation. The presenter arrived more than a half hour late, and was unapologetic at that. I will not belabor the point, but those running the seminar were squirming, as were we participants.

The seminar was scheduled to teach us how to use social media in its myriad intricacies to promote our writing. The presenter was someone with great credentials who was too disorganized and too incoherent to teach others.

Here's what I learned: I didn't need a seemingly credentialed expert to tell me how to do something best learned through trial and error, so I went home to create a new blog. When I set out with sincere efforts and a deep desire, add patience and my husband's expertise, the proverbial mountain moves.

Later, after grocery shopping and other errands, Bruce drove 31 miles from home into another century. This was the serendipity. We walked in the dusk in a charming town with a country weekly newspaper, a bandstand for outdoor summer musical events, an ice cream shop, antique stores, and homes from the Revolutionary era to Victorian painted ladies.

The weather has been murky and drizzly for weeks, but on this Saturday walk, only a fine mist hung in the air. We wandered away from the downtown on Grace Street. Really though, if you think about it, shouldn't we always be walking on Grace Street?

Suddenly, the town ran out. We were back in the agricultural past.

Nature does abhor a vacuum. Ivy had permeated and then subsumed an entire two story wood frame house. At home, I started with the 1940 census to learn about the family who lived and prospered here, once, and an old lady named Mary who was the last of them. Time marched on, slaves and free men lived and died. Things changed, but the marsh grasses, the ivy, the sky and the soil remain, unchanged and unimpressed for hundreds of years.